We
just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying.
According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social
Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States
make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a moment.
You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a
month – especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than half
of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In order
to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that
produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in
America today.

You can find the report that the Social Security Administration just released right here. The following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…

-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.-62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.-71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

That first number is truly staggering. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.

If
you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks
off, you would make approximately $20,000. This should tell you
something about the quality of the jobs that our economy is producing at
this point.

And of course the numbers above are only for those that are actually working. As I discussed just recently,
there are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially
unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans
that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those
two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age
Americans that do not have a job right now.

Every
so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives
announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated
hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.”
Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are
referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most
cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American
communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India,
Vietnam or Mexico.

Buried in a long story
about corruption in China in The New York Times a couple of months ago
was the astonishing fact that the era of “supercharged growth” over the
past several decades had the effect of “lifting more than 600 million
people out of poverty.” From handouts? From Habitat for Humanity? From
the Clinton Global Initiative?

No,
oddly enough, China has been enriched by American-supplied jobs, making
most of the destined-for-the-dump merchandise you find on store shelves
all over America, every piece of plastic you can name, as well as Apple
products, Barbie dolls or Nike LeBron basketball shoes retailed in the
United States for up to $320 a pair. “The uplifting of impoverished
people” was one of the reasons Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder, gave in
1998 for moving his factories out of the United States.

The
Chinese success, helped by American investment, is perhaps not
astonishing after all; it has coincided with a large number of
Americans’ being put out of work and plunged into poverty.

In
a wish to get to grips with local mystagogies and obfuscations I have
spent the past three years traveling in the Deep South, usually on back
roads, mainly in the smaller towns, in the same spirit of inquiry that
vitalized me on journeys in China and Africa and elsewhere. Yes, I saw
the magnolia blossoms, the battlefields of the Civil War, the antebellum
mansions of superfluous amplitude; the catfish farms and the cotton
fields and the blues bars; attended the gun shows and the church
services and the football games.

But
if there was one experience of the Deep South that stayed with me it
was the sight of shutdown factories and towns with their hearts torn out
of them, and few jobs. There are outsourcing stories all over America,
but the effects are stark in the Deep South.

The
proclaiming of the ‘end of feminism’ by the Spectator and others is
merely an attempt to deflect blame for problems society has failed to
tackle

Feminism is dead. Long live feminism. The front page of the Spectator and a spate of other articles would have us believe the battle is won and we can now “move on”.

I
can’t be the only one who thinks this is wonderful news. We highly
strung, hand-wringing, over-sensitive, perpetually offended wilting
violets can hang up our suffragette-coloured hats, stop combing Twitter
in desperate search of minor criticism to weep about and finally stop
hating all the men for long enough to get boyfriends. Rejoice!

Except
… there are still just a few minor issues to sort out. As kind as it is
of the Spectator (that great bastion of equality, which recently
brought us a blow by blow comparison of the looks of the female Labour leadership contenders) to let us poor weary feminists off the hook, there’s a bit of a catch. Women are still being murdered by their male partners every week; 85,000 of us are still being raped each year and 400,000 sexually assaulted; while 54,000 of us lose our jobs each year because of maternity discrimination. British women earn about 19% less than men overall, there are fewer of us running FTSE 100 companies than there are men named John. We are the majority of low-paid workers and the domestic and caring work we do is unpaid and undervalued. At school, one third of us will suffer unwanted sexual touching, also known as sexual assault, between the ages of 16 and 18. One in four of us will experience domestic violence.
But you already know all that. You’ve heard it all before. The
Spectator and others are terribly thoughtful to offer us a break,
because it is a bit tiring, really, to repeat these statistics over and
over again. It’s difficult to keep banging on about a problem that
remains unsolved, while a vocal section of the population sticks its
fingers in its ears and sings: “Nah nah nah nah naaaah, I can’t hear
you!”

There is a bit of a glitch in their plan though, because
angrily denying that a problem even exists tends to be one of the
clearest indicators that a society has yet to get to grips with it.

So
what is the source of this growing angst about feminism? If the
movement truly were fading to an obscure death, as so many commentators
suggest, you might think that front-page articles declaring its
proponents “feminazis”
and trumpeting its demise would hardly be necessary. The real clue is
to be found in the articles themselves, which fixate on objections to
wolf whistles and urge us to get a grip and admit that the real reason
for the under-representation of women in politics is women’s own gooey fixation with babies.
(Don’t worry, there’ll be an emergency feminist meeting where we can
get together and work out what to do now the secret ovary-aching truth
has been revealed.)

Both arguments suggest a stricken, defensive
desire to deflect any sense of blame from the majority of men. If we
maintain that there might be some connection between the treatment of
women’s bodies as public property in the street and the fact that they
are discriminated against in the workplace, we’re suddenly suggesting
wolf-whistlers might have to reconsider their behaviour. If we foist the
burden for discrimination on women’s own uncontrollable hormones,
there’s no longer any public responsibility to do anything about the
problem, because it’s perfectly natural.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Yet more anti-human behavior from the followers of Allah. Islam stand in
opposition to all that Western Civilization stand for. Including human
rights, freedom of speech, and thought. They are anti-woman and
anti-LGBT.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Our
addiction to consuming things is a vicious cycle, and buying a bigger
house to store it all isn’t the answer. Here’s how to get started on
downsizing

Madeleine SomervilleTuesday 20 October 2015The personal storage industry rakes in $22bn each year, and it’s only getting bigger. Why?I’ll
give you a hint: it’s not because vast nations of hoarders have finally
decided to get their acts together and clean out the hall closet.

It’s
also not because we’re short on space. In 1950 the average size of a
home in the US was 983 square feet. Compare that to 2011, when American
houses ballooned to an average size of 2,480 square feet – almost triple
the size.

And finally, it’s not because of our growing families.
This will no doubt come as a great relief to our helpful commenters who
each week kindly suggest that for maximum environmental impact we simply
stop procreating altogether: family sizes in the western world are
steadily shrinking, from an average of 3.37 people in 1950 to just 2.6
today.

So, if our houses have tripled in size while the number of
people living in them has shrunk, what, exactly, are we doing with all
of this extra space? And why the billions of dollars tossed to an
industry that was virtually nonexistent a generation or two ago?

Well,
friends, it’s because of our stuff. What kind of stuff? Who cares!
Whatever fits! Furniture, clothing, children’s toys (for those not fans
of deprivation, that is), games, kitchen gadgets and darling tchotchkes
that don’t do anything but take up space and look pretty for a season or
two before being replaced by other, newer things – equally pretty and
equally useless.

The simple truth is this: you can read all the
books and buy all the cute cubbies and baskets and chalkboard labels,
even master the life-changing magic of cleaning up – but if you have
more stuff than you do space to easily store it, your life will be spent
a slave to your possessions.We shop because we’re bored,
anxious, depressed or angry, and we make the mistake of buying material
goods and thinking they are treats which will fill the hole, soothe the
wound, make us feel better. The problem is, they’re not treats, they’re
responsibilities and what we own very quickly begins to own us.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

From Raw Story:http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/it-is-now-clear-that-the-hippies-won-the-culture-war/History News Network28 Sep 2015As
blue jeans, beards, body adornments, natural foods, legal marijuana,
gay marriage, and single parenthood have gained acceptance in mainstream
American society in recent years, it is now clear that the hippies won
the culture wars that were launched nearly fifty years ago. It was in
the mid-1960s that one of America’s oddest social movements, the
hippies, suddenly appeared. This counterculture of psychedelic drugs,
rock music, and casual sex had its roots in the gargantuan size of the
baby boomer generation, in youth’s churning hormones, and in the arrival
of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or “acid”). The Sixties
counterculture, its beliefs and practices, its odyssey into the
Seventies, and its many legacies as it became integrated into mainstream
culture help explain the United States today.

Hippies, almost all
of whom were white and middle-class, owed a lot to the Beat Generation.
In the Fifties the writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg promoted an
alternative lifestyle outside the middle-class “rat race.” Like the
Beats, hippies smoked marijuana, grew beards, indulged in a lot of sex,
and rejected mainstream values, but the new generation also marked
itself as distinct. Taking LSD in prodigious quantities, freaks
preferred rock to jazz and wore bright-colored clothes. Far more
numerous than the Beats, hippies dominated entire urban neighborhoods,
such as the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the East Village in New
York. Unlike the gloomy Beats, hippies were exuberant. Large numbers
made these youthful rebels optimistic that the entire society would
eventually join the counterculture, and in a way it did.

At the
heart, the counterculture was about three things: a search for
authenticity, an insistence upon individualism, and a desire for
community. Although hippies disagreed about many things, they shared a
desire to be authentic. Being true to one’s self meant rejecting
middle-class culture in order to “do your own thing.” A spiritual search
was often part of the quest. Deeply suspicious of both society and
government, freaks embraced individualism as a true expression of
authenticity. However, this attitude left hippies feeling isolated and
lonely, which explains why the love generation sought community. In the
mid-Sixties communes popped up in cities. By the early Seventies rising
rents, racial tensions, and crime drove hippies “back to the land.”
Self-sufficient agriculture was a hard transition for children of the
suburban middle class. Most communes failed when trust funds, parental
checks, or welfare payments ran out. Hippie women bore a lot of
children. Rural communes did enable residents to sort out their lives.

Psychedelic
drugs and rock music were accompanied by the explosion of easy sex.
More casual sexual mores, however, had been going on in American society
for a hundred years, as evidenced by the growing divorce rate. Hippies
merely accelerated the process. They declared their parents to be
hypocrites for preaching traditional values while having many affairs.
Free love would not have happened without the birth control pill. First
sold in 1960, it took several years before single young women gained
access. Once the risk of an unwanted pregnancy plummeted, the double
standard ended. Hippie men declared that everyone should have sex with
whomever they wanted whenever they wanted. In practice, this turned out
to mean that hippie men indulged themselves, while women ended up
discarded, heart-broken, and depressed. Eventually, many hippie women
came to see free love as a male sexual fantasy that did not meet women’s
needs. Some hippie women became feminists.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Voters
on both the left and the right often claim that there is no difference
between the Democratic and Republican Parties, and of course that isn’t
true. There’s a big difference between Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia,
for one thing. But there may be more to this argument than you think.

Democrats now depend
as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters. Democrats represent
a majority of the richest congressional districts, and the party’s
elected officials are more responsive to the policy agenda of the
well-to-do than to average voters. The party and its candidates have
come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a
quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another
quarter.

The
gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion,
immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On
economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the
policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the
needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called
underclass.

In
this respect, the Democratic Party and its elected officials have come
to resemble their Republican counterparts far more than the public focus
on polarization would lead you to expect. The current popularity of
Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the
mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging
from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to
time limits on welfare for the poor.

“Both
Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift
toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other
characteristics, offers less support for government provision of
transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and
deregulation of a number of industries,” the political scientists Adam
Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal write in a 2014
essay titled “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?”

Monday, October 5, 2015

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson